JUST GONE BACK TO VINYL AFTER INHERITING A TURNTABLE AMP. CANT BELIEVE WHY I GOT RID OF MY OLD VINYL YEARS AGO IN FAVOUR OF CDS. SOUND QUALITY OF VINYL IS FAR BETTER QUALITY.I KNOW ITS BEEN DEBATED BEFORE BUT ITS TRUE, WHATS EVERYONE ELSE THINK.
I prefer the sound of vinyl more, however I see no point in trying to explain why. All this will do is cause hours of debatable arguments. Thanks, but no thanks. Us analog purists may know better, but then somebody will come here and say different. Frankly, I have found a good portion of these types of threads go nowhere to be honest about 98% of the time. I say that you are going to like what you like, and that is pretty much about it. At times, some of your best secrets regarding being an audiophile are your own secrets.
Similar debates can be started on what kind of music you like, do you like cream cakes or pork pies... etc...
It's personal, it's individual... and depends on many many factors.
Personally I prefer the sound of vinyl 100%, even a little crackle makes it feel right... transfered to CD the same crackle is annoying. Old music, classic music, personally I think should be vinyl based.
Modern, digital, dance, electronic music may well benefit from the clinical CD format.
Originally Posted By Jason Mills: Similar debates can be started on what kind of music you like, do you like cream cakes or pork pies... etc...
It's personal, it's individual... and depends on many many factors.
Personally I prefer the sound of vinyl 100%, even a little crackle makes it feel right... transfered to CD the same crackle is annoying. Old music, classic music, personally I think should be vinyl based.
Modern, digital, dance, electronic music may well benefit from the clinical CD format.
But... it's all in your own ears, mind and heart.
You know Jason, I honestly agree with your above quoted statement. It is true, and I feel the same also in that classic recordings recorded prior to the 1990's should be not just experienced in analog non-remastered sound, but I also feel too that they most definitely be experienced on the format they originally came out on, I.E. vinyl. I do feel though that recordings originally recorded digitally post 1990 and thereafter, have also benefited for some interesting reason when treated to the listening experience of the vinyl format!
Try this experiment without the digital no noising technique on your computer, along with a near mint recording.........
If a record is pristine and not scratched or scuffed, for some reason vinyl seems to sound greatly enhanced when transferred to a CD without the use of digitally enhanced remastering technology. Yes, this also means that you will hear some flaws here and there with the format, but this also means that you are getting the complete picture of what the recording is supposed to sound like without an analog note being lost in translation through either digital remastering techniques, but also too you a much purer recording of music without the compression and missing musical info, that at times seems to be missed with digital technology! Try this experiment, mainly for the purpose of archiving your precious vinyl recordings, and you will see that you can still get a decent carbon copied/mirrored image sound when recorded to a CD directly without any special effects. You may find the results the most satisfying for recording analog vinyl regarding any digital source.
In closing............
As far as an MP3 is concerned? Forget it! Anytime musical info is stored on a digital file, that is basically what it is; storage, and it is within my whole honest opinion that a vinyl format transferred to MP3 sounds like shit!
Just keep in mind, this is just my opinion..........
Flac it. Who uses mp3's for music? seriously? The quality of mastering now is pretty amazing so I have no problem in listening to music on cd, of course, if I can find the LP that's going to be my first choice but if the vinyl's unavailable or at collector prices I'll chose the cd.
Originally Posted By Servalan: Flac it. Who uses mp3's for music? seriously?
To make this simple Servalan.......
The people that don't know what a Flac is are the ones that are probably still using the MP3 format for musical storage on they're computers, along with horrific sounding Ipod's for vinyl transcription.
For everyone who is still using the MP3 format are the ones that should check out Flac, but until it becomes a much far better known medium in the mainstream, in the meantime, it will remain cutting edge technology. But for now, maybe some could try the experiment of recording on a CD first and see how it works. Or, just don't bother with digital at all, and stick to vinyl, especially if they are insistent upon, like me personally, preferentially wanting pure analog sound........
VJ, I wasn't actually thinking about mainstream use - more for vinyl enthusiasts who don't want to play their records (?) There are plenty of places on the internet hosting long oop titles in flac and other lossless formats, and anything that I've encoded myself has been done in wav. or aiff to preserve the weight of the sound from vinyl. But I'm no audiophile, I just want to hear the music so if I can only find an mp3 that'll have to do.
I completely understand your desire for analogue sound- you can't really beat it!
you cant beat analogue sound. as servalan just said it has a weight and depth you cant achieve with digital. i have a mint album and the same on cd which has been 24bit supermapped and you can still hear the difference in quality the best being the 35 year old vinyl album.
Well, if you are not an audiophile, then none of this really applies to your situation. Most people that "just want to hear the music", couldn't give a rats hooptie hoo for the most part about how something sounds. Again this thread may perhaps not apply to those who just listen for the music, as opposed to the actual enjoyment of the listening experience in itself.
I was going to say its like Ford vs Chevy, but pork pie or cream pie I guess works too. IMO vinyl is just easy on the ears. Someone once told me that the brain goes into overdrive trying to subconsciously fill in the thrown away info of digital and it makes sense to me. Listen fatigue just doesn't happen to me with vinyl. Digital has its place, and CD's have served us well for 30 years as a portable media, but their days are numbered I think. Why would we keep them, we can put 50x the data on a postage stamp now. There is just nothing that compares to a great vinyl pressing. Now go and look at an original Ansel Adams print hanging somewhere and you will be asking yourself "why digital photography?".
I like both formats but I will say this for digital.bass is much bigger in digital format and is much more punchy and solid that analog cant touch.I bought disturbed cd the sickness and the vinyl lp also and sorry but the digital format is better and I also bought aerosmiths cd rocks and compared it to the vinyl.sorry digital but vinyl wins.I think it depends on the time and era it was recorded.some stuff is just better digital and some is best vinyl.
If anyone has the vinyl (LP) version of In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida by Iron Butterfly and also the CD version, do an A-B comparison. The CD version is ridiculous and is probably the worst example of CD re-mastering I have run across. For my 2-cents worth, I don't like the fact that vinyl performs best only on the first play and is worn with each subsequent play until eventually the "highs" become muted by the stylus damaging the groove a tiny bit each time. It is for this reason that I prefer to digitize those albums or songs that I listen to frequently and like to access easily. Each to his own.
Originally Posted By William Wren: I like both formats but I will say this for digital.bass is much bigger in digital format and is much more punchy and solid that analog cant touch.I bought disturbed cd the sickness and the vinyl lp also and sorry but the digital format is better and I also bought aerosmiths cd rocks and compared it to the vinyl.sorry digital but vinyl wins.I think it depends on the time and era it was recorded.some stuff is just better digital and some is best vinyl.
You need to come and hear my Telarc 1812 and you might just change your mind about bass and vinyl. Better yet get yourself a copy. It is mind blowing when the cannons fire. It has everything to do with the pressing. The stuff pressed as of late is pretty lame, but get the first issue of most recordings, especially the Japanese and German flavors. Ummmmmmmmm
Okay, I didn't want to have to honestly come in on this discussion, but I think I will likewise have to side with Ken. The only thing I disagree with Ken on is liking digital. Yes, as I said before, digital, particularly cd's have their uses, mainly for storage of music, but when it comes to the sound of vinyl, sorry to say, it can't be beat!
I am also one besides Ken who will disagree with Mr. William Wren. With a proper turntable & set up, along with an excellent audiophile grade cartridge, there is no way you can match the specs of bass in digital like you can with analog/vinyl! It has been proven and tested many times, that you can find these tests to hear them for yourself on You Tube, and you can still tell the difference between the cd vs. vinyl tests dramatically, even on shitty speakers!
Again, the key is all in the set up, and for this round of the debate, naturally I am going to take Ken's side this time.
Originally Posted By Vinyl Junkie: Okay, I didn't want to have to honestly come in on this discussion, but I think I will likewise have to side with Ken. The only thing I disagree with Ken on is liking digital. Yes, as I said before, digital, particularly cd's have their uses, mainly for storage of music, but when it comes to the sound of vinyl, sorry to say, it can't be beat!
I am also one besides Ken who will disagree with Mr. William Wren. With a proper turntable & set up, along with an excellent audiophile grade cartridge, there is no way you can match the specs of bass in digital like you can with analog/vinyl! It has been proven and tested many times, that you can find these tests to hear them for yourself on You Tube, and you can still tell the difference between the cd vs. vinyl tests dramatically, even on shitty speakers!
Again, the key is all in the set up, and for this round of the debate, naturally I am going to take Ken's side this time.
V J
Hey where did I say I liked digital? I said it had its place, I love to ride mountain bikes and usually solo (I need better friends) and I like to listen, I just don't think vinyl will work there.
looking at a LP Record which is very (old) say like 1950s 1960s and still looks good as good as new and Rare Record and a high price makes me feel great knowing they are worth a lot of money. I play all kinds of music at home all on vinyl and the sound is amazing.Even the feel of vinyl and the nice covers.
Hi, I just joined this site! Being a veteran audio enthusiast who is familiar with many analog and digital formats, I figured I would drop in my "two cents' worth" at this point.
While I love vinyl, I believe there are some things it cannot do well--like bass--in standard commercial 33-1/3 format. And CD's are bandwidth limited, which actually makes them a "lossy" format! When you consider it, they're both "lossy", actually, and the only HD audio formats are SACD and 24-bit, 192 kHz files. But some people can't hear the difference between HD formats and properly played back CD's. Go figure...
When many of the original vinyls were cut, engineers purposely rolled off the bass at anywhere from 50 to 100 Hz, thereby emasculating the sound. They did this so they could cut more songs into the grooves, because true bass takes up a lot of groove width. As Frank Zappa would say, "Strictly from commercial" :-). Telarc's 1812 Overture is pleasant anomoly, but the CD version of it is potentially more dangerous to woofer cones. Donald Fagan's "Morph the Cat" has great sound for commercial rock, very evident on CD. But you ought to hear the RTI 4-sided vinyl pressing! Talk about killer bass! And that's because each side only has three songs on it (hence two 12" discs, and the ensuing high price). So vinyl is actually capable of full bandwidth, but at great cost--literally. CD does great bass cheaply.
But the treble sucks. Reason? The depressingly low sample rate of 44.1 kHz at 16 bits. Do the math: a 20 kHz tone (the supposed top range of human hearing) only gets sampled fully about 2 times per second at 44.1 kHz. 10 kHz gets sampled 4.41 times, and so on. There's a lot of missing data here, hence the "lossy" format. No wonder it does bass well, especially with a dynamic range that exceeds even direct-to-disc vinyl.
But vinyl gets even worse treatment than what they do to John Barleycorn! More on that later if you care to read more of my incessant babble...
Originally Posted By Tony Hicks England: looking at a LP Record which is very (old) say like 1950s 1960s and still looks good as good as new and Rare Record and a high price makes me feel great knowing they are worth a lot of money. I play all kinds of music at home all on vinyl and the sound is amazing.Even the feel of vinyl and the nice covers.
your right tony..
i love listening to old gerry and the pacemakers and dave clark
5 lps on the original capitol pressings.. a good shape copy can produce
really nice rich sound..unlike tin can sounding cds..
Originally Posted By William Wren: I like both formats but I will say this for digital.bass is much bigger in digital format and is much more punchy and solid that analog cant touch.I bought disturbed cd the sickness and the vinyl lp also and sorry but the digital format is better and I also bought aerosmiths cd rocks and compared it to the vinyl.sorry digital but vinyl wins.I think it depends on the time and era it was recorded.some stuff is just better digital and some is best vinyl.
Didnt realize I would have so many people disagree with me on this format thing.oh well I guess being a musician for 25 yrs and 8 yrs of studio experience and countless hours of research and trial an error in recording and produceing isnt enough experience for these trained vinyl people.sorry I said anything at all.I still stick with the ara thing.if it came out on vinyl first it was the best.if it came out on digital first it is the best.
Originally Posted By William Wren: I like both formats but I will say this for digital.bass is much bigger in digital format and is much more punchy and solid that analog cant touch.I bought disturbed cd the sickness and the vinyl lp also and sorry but the digital format is better and I also bought aerosmiths cd rocks and compared it to the vinyl.sorry digital but vinyl wins.I think it depends on the time and era it was recorded.some stuff is just better digital and some is best vinyl.
Didnt realize I would have so many people disagree with me on this format thing.oh well I guess being a musician for 25 yrs and 8 yrs of studio experience and countless hours of research and trial an error in recording and produceing isnt enough experience for these trained vinyl people.sorry I said anything at all.I still stick with the ara thing.if it came out on vinyl first it was the best.if it came out on digital first it is the best.
Well William, I don't think it has anything to do with the experience of how many years one has had in the studio. I think what it mainly comes down to, is all in what the ear hears, especially with digital recordings. When digital is heard in analog, for me, every time, if it is mastered right, it is sheer magic! The Digital is actually enhanced when put on a nice warm sounding hot platter. What else can I say? It is all down to how you hear the music. One person can hear one thing, than another person can hear something another way.
In the end, again, it may not really matter too much of how many years experience anyone can have in the studio, especially since there are also many different ways a recording can be mixed. There really is no wrong way, or right way about doing this, but again, it is all in what your ears are going to hear. My ears can hear things in a analog, that digital just cannot give, and yes, I do believe that certain things like bass can actually be lost in the format, like certain bass frequency responses, even if the (so called) wow and flutter deal theory can technically challenged. Again, it is all what ones trained ears can preferentially hear. To NOT hear how certain things are lost in translation on the digital format is anyone's guess, but what I do know is that you would have to practically be deaf, so as to not hear the loss. What do I hear? It is flat, tinny, lacking life, and the bass frequencies are definitely lost in translation. But hey, what do I know? I just know my own ears, even if I was never a recording engineer........
I must say this one of the better discussion about this topic. Many other discussions I've read got pretty ugly! I think that everyone can tell the difference one way or another and everybody has their own set of ears. I've been buying vinyl fo rthe last 45 years and there was a time in the mid to late 80's through the early 2000's that i switched over to CDs. I'm glad I kept my vinyl collection! Now I'm going to MusicStack, ebay, and Discogs to replace those CDs. I just think that the analog just flows better than any digital recording. You can hear the full sound of a guitar, drums, bass, horns, whatever it may be not to mention the amount of time the sound engineers spent making these recordings sound great. Today you can buy software and load it on a computer and anyone can mix music to their own liking. Digital just stops at a certain point and its lost. I look at it just like comparing a true photograph vs. a digital photo. A true photograph of a sunset flows from light to dark and the colors blend. A digital sunset is in chucks of light to dark because all these chunks of light are "little bits" of information stored to be retrieved when you need it like throwing in a CD in your car to hear some music to cover up the road noise while you drive. Chunks of information is not music as it was recorded years ago. If it was recorded in digital then that is that but you can't truely turn analog into digital without making sacrificing quality somewhere along the line.
Originally Posted By William Wren: I like both formats but I will say this for digital.bass is much bigger in digital format and is much more punchy and solid that analog cant touch.I bought disturbed cd the sickness and the vinyl lp also and sorry but the digital format is better and I also bought aerosmiths cd rocks and compared it to the vinyl.sorry digital but vinyl wins.I think it depends on the time and era it was recorded.some stuff is just better digital and some is best vinyl.
Didnt realize I would have so many people disagree with me on this format thing.oh well I guess being a musician for 25 yrs and 8 yrs of studio experience and countless hours of research and trial an error in recording and produceing isnt enough experience for these trained vinyl people.sorry I said anything at all.I still stick with the ara thing.if it came out on vinyl first it was the best.if it came out on digital first it is the best.
Well, there is your answer. If you've been a musician for 25 years you can't hear crap anymore!
I have been buying some old original vinyl, either new or NM, 70's era, I've found that the vinyl sound is more dynamic than the same album on CD, the older records on CD sound flat. Plastic quality on CD's is another concern, good quality good sound, bad quality rubbish sound. On the new releases it is much closer, I have several LP and CD's of the same album, then it all comes down to quality of the master, some CD's are awesome, some are woeful! I think a vinyl record can bring more out of a bad recording than a CD can. Strangely I am using a cheap turntable (Sherwood) and a expensive Yamaha CD player (CDS700), imagine if I was using a Rega turntable (coming soon), the vinyl would sound even better.....
To make a long boring explanation short, analog records the whole of what is being produced, but CD quality digital records a sample of what's being produced 44 thousand times a second. That sounds like allot, but it's not enough to completely fool the human ear, but some may disagree.
I own a rega rp1 turntable and a rega apollo CD player.
I feed both into a dual mono choke regulated pre-power amp feeding monitors that are bi-wired.
On this system both format sound absolutely excellent.
My point of view is therefore thus;
Both vinyl and CD have the 'potential' to sound superb. If you do not think so you have not spent enough on the audio equipment.
Saying that the audio equipment is not absolutly of crucial importance when listening to music is akin to listening to a symphony by Beethoven over the telephone and then claiming he could not write a descent tune.
I am now getting ready to duck and dive at the abuse I may receive from those who have never actually 'heard music'!!!!
As a communication equipment engineer who uses digital signal processing theory every day, I'm continually bemused by the discussions of analog vs digital I see on line. While I can totally sympathize with a defense of vinyl made from the position that a person likes records better as a more aesthetically pleasing medium (I'm one of these) or that they like the sound better from a personal preference perspective, or that they have specific vinyl records that sound better than the commercial CD release, the arguments that digital can't reproduce audio better than (let alone as well as) vinyl are just wrong, and this can be proven mathematically.
The Nyquist theorem (a theorem is a mathematical conclusion that can be proven be a logical trail of steps from basic and irrefutable principles, and is not something someone is guessing about) shows that if you sample a signal at a rate at least twice the highest frequency of interest, you can reproduce it perfectly. This does assume that the signal is sampled with infinite precision and not 16 bit samples, and it assumes that the sampling is perfectly uniform, which it never is, and it assumes that a filter is used to eliminate frequencies above the half sample rate that will "alias" into the desired band when sampled and that this filter doesn't distort the signal in the audible band at all, which is also not true. But all of these sources of degradation are quantifiable. Signal processing engineers think about what these things do as follows: you hoped to get a signal that was a perfect reproduction of the original. Instead you get something that's close, but not quite right. One way to think about what you got is that it's the exact signal you wanted plus some extra stuff that's added to it to mess it up. This extra stuff is noise and distortion, and the quality of the reproduction of the sound can be measured by a ratio of the signal power to the power in the noise and distortion (which is given acronyms like SINAD or SNR). We'd like the SNR number to be really big, since that means that the good signal dwarfs the noise and distortion.
Vinyl also has a noise and distortion problem, although the cause of its noise and distortion is different. The process of cutting a record master distorts the signal when it compresses the grooves, and it also doesn't cut the grooves perfectly faithfully. The stampers are made by a electrolysis plating process that doesn't perfectly recreate the surface of the master, and the stampers wear as more records are made. The vinyl used to make the records is not perfectly homogeneous and when pressed its grooves don't perfectly match the shape of the stampers. As the record cools after being stamped, the grooves contract making this difference even more pronounced. Then the record gets put on a turntable, which adds rumble due to its motor, acoustic feedback as the sound in the room vibrates the stylus, and further degradation as the record gets dusty, worn, scratched, and beer splattered over time.
Either the analog or digital process of getting the sound from the original source to your ears can be done well or poorly, depending on the quality of the equipment being used in mastering, manufacturing, and playback. There is no question that there are examples of horrendously mastered CDs that have terrible SNR. This tends to happen more often on CDs made in the early days of CDs, say, before 1988. This is true for three reasons: first, there was more bad mastering equipment out there since the industry was learning how to make it well, second, there were fewer people who really understood how to master well, and third, the record companies were in a headlong rush to get their entire back catalogs onto CD so they could sell the stuff all over again and as a result they just cranked out mastering jobs as fast as they could get it done. But since those days, mastering has improved dramatically, and the biggest remaining problem these days is that for older recordings you have to go back to a master magnetic tape in the record company vault that might be 40 years old now, and the master tapes themselves lose a lot of quality in that time. So even a perfect reproduction of what's on the master tape isn't going to sound like a record that was pressed in the day.
All these are mitigating factors that create fuzziness in the answer to the question: "which medium more faithfully reproduces the original audio?"
But if the starting point is a band that makes a record in the studio in 2012 and we want to know which medium more faithfully reproduces what they recorded, the answer is that a well made CD will outperform an lp in SNR terms. A well made CD can produce SNRs better than 80 dB, but vinyl has a hard time getting better than the mid 50s. Each 10 dB is a factor of 10 in power, so this means that the noise and distortion is about 300 times worse in a record than a CD. Audiophiles like to argue (with truth) that not all noise is perceived the same way by the brain (witness the people on this thread who feel that scratches and crackle don't diminish their listening experience), but to me, a factor of 300 is pretty significant and can absorb a lot of variation in how types of noise are perceived.
This brings me back around to the way I intentionally phrased the question at the beginning of this: "which of the two produces the original audio more faithfully?" This is different from the question "do you prefer the sound of CDs or records?". The job of the medium is to convey what the artist intended to you as faithfully as possible. If a person's maximum enjoyment of the music requires that the medium makes an adjustment to the sound, this is a shortcoming of the artist and not the medium. But how often do you get to do an A/B comparison between a record or CD and the original master tape? Unless you work in a recording studio, the answer is "almost never". So very few people are in a position to say which medium is more faithful.
Having played in a band that made recordings and got them pressed into vinyl and made into CDs, and also having run a small independent record label, I've had the opportunity to hear both ends of the process a few times (but not a lot). In all cases I felt that there was no audible difference between the CD release and the master tape, and there was some audible difference between the vinyl and the master that I could detect if I really paid attention. But neither was enough to make any real difference to me - it's like watching a wall of TVs at Best Buy - you can tell the difference when they are all side by side, but take one home and it's damn hard to remember what it was about the one you couldn't afford that the one you bought is missing.
One last point: while I sympathize the intuition of non-mathematical people who think that CD audio obviously throws away important sound information through sampling, one way to get a sense that intuition might fail you in thinking about this is to ask yourself how an MP3 can even remotely resemble the original audio, since mp3s discard about 90% (!) of the data contained in CD audio (a 3 minute song takes about 30 MB in uncompressed wav format and about 3 MB in a decent mp3). Certainly if you shaved 90% of the vinyl out of the grooves of your Dark Side Of The Moon lp, the result would not be pretty.
Finally, on the idea that vinyl produces bass better than CD - bass is where the argument for vinyl is absolutely the weakest. For bass frequencies (say, everything below 200 Hz), the sampling rate in CDs is 200 times the frequencies of interest - 100 times what the Nyquist theorem requires. The sorts of distortion that impact CDs are at a dead minimum in the bass range. What's more, CD can reproduce bass virtually down to DC, whereas (as someone else observed in this thread) the RIAA mastering guidelines for vinyl have the engineer deliberately roll off the bass at low frequencies.
None of this should dissuade anyone from saying they prefer the sound of vinyl - but the important thing to remember is that this preference doesn't mean that vinyl is able to reproduce the original audio better.
And by the way, I probably buy 20 vinyls lps to every one CD myself. Vinyl has demonstrably better karma, and you don't even have to play it to recognize that.
Steve Gardner,
All of what you say may be true, the trouble is our ears are not mathmeticians.
(vinyl produces bass better than CD) quote.
Some people do not have the same command of the English language as others, when they say better, they actually mean more aesthetically pleasing. No amount of math can improve ones aesthetic senses. To most peoples ears vinyl 'sounds' preferable to CD, no matter how many graphs and maths you throw at it.
Just as some find Constable preferable to Picasso, the discerning audiophile finds vinyl preferable to CD.
So keep buying your vinyl, your heart is ruling your head and that is what counts eh?
(how often do you get to do an A/B comparison between a record or CD) quote.
I have done this many times. Despite the surface noise and vinyl roar I can honestly claim that CD has never won. I have tried this with friends and family too. The usual response is,
"That has to be the best turntable I have ever heard and your CD player must be poor"
The power of marketing and the fact that so many really lousy turntables were made causes this conclusion.
In actual fact the RP1 is cheaper than the Apollo.
So in conclusion, vinyl is best, at least to the western ear.
Now then what about the debate that Japanese men hear differently to western men??!!!!!
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